Joe Biden: White America 'has to admit there's still a systemic racism'

By JOHN VERHOVEK Jan 21, 2019, 2:17 PM ET

Former Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at a breakfast Monday morning in Washington honoring Martin Luther King Jr., said that white Americans need to acknowledge and admit the fact that systemic racism still exists and must be rooted out.

"The bottom line is we have a lot to root out, but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don't like to acknowledge even exists," Biden said at an event hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network. "We don't even consciously acknowledge it. But it's been built into every aspect of our system."

Link to tweet

He continued, "Because when your schools are substandard, when your houses are undervalued, when your car insurance costs more for no apparent reason, when poverty rates for black Americans is still twice that of white Americans, ... there's something we have to admit. Not you -- we -- White America has to admit there's a still a systematic racism. And it goes almost unnoticed by so many of us."

Biden also expressed optimism that positive change is on its way, referencing the historic nature of the presidential inauguration he attended 10 years ago this weekend, when Barack Obama became the nation's first African-American president.

-snip-